Activity on the Lebanese stock market fell during the fifth month of the year 2020, with volume traded on the BSE dropping by 37.49% to 6,731,749 shares during the month of May, from 10,769,186 shares in April. Conversely, value traded increased by 15.84% month-on-month to $27.77 million, from $23.97 million in April. Trades were mainly concentrated on banking sector stocks, which controlled 82.81% of the total traded volume, followed by real estate stocks (17.19%), with no activity on industry & trading stocks being recorded. Market capitalization narrowed to around $5.98 billion by end of May, from nearly $6.53 billion at end of April, and remained much lower than the circa $8.51 billion reading recorded in May of last year.

On a cumulative basis, the number of shares changing hands on the BSE plunged by 60.02% year-on-year to around 74.29 million shares during the first five months of the current year, with value traded sinking by 94.13% over the same period to about $46.58 million. As far as trading multiples are concerned, the weighted average Price to Book Value (P/BV) of listed stocks ended the fifth month of 2020 lower at 0.559x, compared to 0.662x in April mainly as a result of the contraction in the prices of listed real estate stocks. The Price to Book Value multiple for the month of May came just below last year’s reading of 0.600x at end of May 2019.

Overall, trading activity was weaker during the month of May 2020, as evidenced by the decrease in the turnover ratio (being the number of shares traded divided by total listed shares) to 0.35%, down from 0.55% in April. The turnover ratio, however, was very thin on a cumulative basis reaching 3.82% by end of the first five months of this year, compared to 10.58% in the same period last year as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdown that followed, not to mention Lebanon’s crippled economic activity since quite some time now.